Today, nearly every computer user is well accustomed to the broadcast television medium. When a new television channel is requested, the new channel is generally displayed (rendered) very quickly. The same can be said for conventional broadcast radio stations.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for conventional Internet streamed content. Streaming media is typically provided from a server device to a client device over the Internet or other like network. For a variety of technical reasons, the end-user experience can be degraded, for example, by pauses experienced in the rendering due to late-arriving/resent data. Such pauses, however, tend to occur randomly and in certain configurations occur very rarely. However, there is one pause that most end-users experience every time they select a streaming media program, namely, a slow startup time.
This poor startup experience tends to inhibit the adoption of streaming media in many markets. It is also tends to reduce the amount of time end-users are willing to use the technology. Thus, channel “surfing” is largely unacceptable with conventional streaming techniques. Hence, there is a need for improved streaming media methods and apparatuses that can significantly reduce the startup time that the end-user experiences.